Director of Sales and Marketing

EarthEnable is transforming the way people live by making homes healthier for families across rural Rwanda. 80% of Rwandans live in homes with dirt floors which are dusty, unsanitary, and fertile breeding grounds for parasites and germs. While replacing a dirt floor with concrete has significant health benefits (e.g. reducing diarrhea by 50% and parasitic infections by 80%), concrete is unaffordable for many Rwandans who need it.

EarthEnable addresses this pressing and ubiquitous problem by selling high-quality, earthen floors that are 80% cheaper than concrete with 90% less embedded energy. Earthen floors are already prevalent in modern homes in the United States. Our floors are composed of natural materials (gravel, clay, sand, and murram) commonly found in Rwanda. EarthEnable trains and hires local masons to install the floors which are ultimately sealed using a proprietary drying oil that makes them waterproof, strong, and polished. In its first 20 months of operations, we have installed over 200,000 square feet of flooring and employed over 90 Rwandese staff.

About The Role

The person hired for this role will have a unique and urgent opportunity to catapult us to the next level of impact. We are in a great place; we have developed an excellent product that our customers cherish and that has multiplicative health, employment, and environmental benefits. We have scaled rapidly to reach over 600 customers in just over a year and a half. Now, we are ready for a visionary Director of Sales and Marketing to pilot and implement innovative strategies and business models to fundamentally disrupt the home improvement market for the rural poor.

The Director of Sales and Marketing will lead EarthEnable’s swift expansion to new geographic regions as well as to even lower socio-economic segments of the population. The job will include piloting, iterating, and implementing strategies to improve all aspects of customer relationship management: marketing, sales, branding, payment plans, promotions, pricing, and after-service support. It will also include developing and testing scaling models (Organic growth? Franchising? Partnerships? Licensing our oil? The options are endless!). We need someone who is wildly creative and intellectually curious, excited to take big risks that yield high returns, looks forward to days in the field getting their hands dirty and talking to rural customers, and who runs towards the most challenging of problems, never giving up.

Key Responsibilities Include:

Developing marketing strategies for EarthEnable across Rwanda, e.g. organizing market days, door-to-door sales, village events, village meeting announcements, and a rock-solid customer referral strategy (most of our sales are currently referrals, yet we don’t have a referrals system in place, given the challenges of tracking them)
Piloting innovative savings and credit mechanisms to help customers finance the floor over time (including collateral for savings)
Constantly assessing willingness to pay and elasticity of demand to optimize both impact and revenue
Developing a training academy for sales representatives and supervisory structures (as needed)
Identifying potential partnerships and negotiating partnership agreements (for financing, marketing, sales, etc.)
Enacting an efficient customer follow up system to obtain satisfaction scores and respond to complaints
Ensuring customer default rates and cancellation rates are low
Collecting live and accurate data on leads and clients (including their location) via mobile technology
Working closely with Operations team to align supply and demand
Supporting local brand development and ensuring excellent deals for branded collateral
Building a team that efficiently handles marketing, sales, financing, customer service, and partnerships
Working closely with other senior leadership to determine the optimal business model to scale

Qualifications:

Educational level of A1 or B.A. in business, management, marketing, economics or a related field
2+ years of marketing and sales experience; experience with fast-growing start-ups is a plus
Commitment to Rwanda and specifically working in rural environments for 2+ years
Experience living and working in a developing country (preferably Rwanda / East Africa)
Creative and artistic with an eye for strong visual design and video design
Experience managing and analyzing budgets; modeling cost-effectiveness of marketing strategies
Resourcefulness and critical thinking skills to quickly determine why something isn’t working and iterate quickly to try to solve it; creative problem solving
Exceptional people skills and managerial skills; avid team player; coaching and mentoring approach
Ability to work on a variety of tasks at the same time
Maturity and poise under stress
Excellent attention to detail, commitment to excellence, and outstanding work ethic
Positive attitude, sense of humor, entrepreneurial spirit, curiosity to learn new things, patient with others
Passionate about international development and social enterprise
Strong technology skills (knowledge of Microsoft Word, Excel, Google Docs, and Dropbox)
Graduate degree (MBA, MPA/ID, MPA, MPH, etc.) a plus, but not required
Fluency in English